I've been keeping an eye out on AI disclosures on Steam (https://www.totallyhuman.io/blog/the-surprising-new-number-o...). While it's unsurprising that devs are using it, what was surprising was the number of games that disclose it. I believe, as of November, it's up to 8% of the while library. The biggest game to disclose AI use right now is Stellaris (with many many millions in sales), though having initially launched many years ago, their GenAI usage is in product updates.

Keep in mind that aggregate statistics about Steam games include things like student projects, and hobby efforts never expected to make money.

But that said, I absolutely expected a high rate because I assumed game devs would be forced to use it by management, just as I am.

Maybe it is a good strategy. Haters will more likely to steer clear instead of raging in comments and others will be less surprised over ai typical inconsistences and issues.

Raph is, at once, incredibly accomplished, thoughtful about design, and humble about it. I once caught him coming off an international flight, and he was excitedly showing off a game he'd coded on the plane. He genuinely loves working on the stuff and thinking about it.

His writing is often SO full of ideas that I can't absorb an entire piece in one sitting. It's like a 12 course tasting menu. The neat thing with his writing is that, despite what he says here about all 12 pieces being important together, you can often just pick an isolated bit and chew on it for a while, and still learn something.

(Presumably return to the other 11 courses later; they'll still be fresh.)

There's a neat demo of this in action here: https://jaxry.github.io/wave-function-collapse/

Another, where you can set cells and then have it solve: https://oskarstalberg.com/game/wave/wave.html

And an itch.io game where you are the wave function selector: https://bolddunkley.itch.io/wfc-mixed

I thought this concept would have found more traction in the world of procgen (in games), because it's pretty neat. But I found it difficult to work with, so perhaps others also did!

Caves of Qud uses it in map generation: https://youtu.be/AdCgi9E90jw

Oskar Stalberg has used it a bit, notably with Townscaper.

https://www.townscapergame.com/

I was just walking down demoscene memory lane yesterday. Some of my favorite demoscene demos were Amiga ones (playlist: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RPdB_zdyMbM&list=PLwds84NCmJ...), which lead me to "The Greatest Video Game Tech Demo Ever," Shadow the Beast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ovwFjgAFhOs

That video's great because it breaks down how Psygnosis managed to get 12 layers of parallax scrolling at 50fps and 128 colors on-screen. I never really loved the game as much as (say) Blood Money, but it was an awesome accomplishment in the same way demoscene demos were!

I loved this one back in the day, and have referenced it within the past month. The author felt that simply changing "cloud" to "butt" was less funny. But that always brings to mind the 1994 TSR mage-to-wizard search-and-replace: https://www.reddit.com/r/DnD/comments/s82mi4/til_that_in_199...

Fantastic piece. I love stuff with interactivity; and the comparison between blur types is great, as your eye can evaluate them side-by-side. Thanks for putting it together!

This is fantastic; thank you for it. The "try the API" page is also excellent!

So true, it is so awesome. I've just replaced my weather network bookmark with the open-meteo's "API Response" chart. I hope open-meteo doesn't mind :)

I like things where you can just jump into the guts and play around. If you spend enough time plinking, you can end up getting an intuitive feel for a system. Also surprised at how many iterations you can crank out these days; I once implemented a Mandel-generator on my TI-81 calculator, and that took forever. Thank you for creating and sharing this!

Rooting for you, as always!

The interactive examples are super fun. Hidden in there is also a link to the author's procgen terrain generator/viewer: https://r3f.maximeheckel.com/sdf6

The inline examples have editable code, but that one's kinda nice because you can just tweak a few knobs.